Why Scientists Shouldn’t Write History

Plato was ‘silly.’ Bacon ‘overrated.’ Galileo ‘behind the times.’ At least from the point of view of a modern physicist.

The theoretical physicist
Steven Weinberg
joins a list of distinguished scientists who have turned their hands to historical or philosophical reflections on science. Mr. Weinberg won his Nobel Prize in physics in 1979 for theoretical work on the unification of forces operating between subatomic particles. As his active involvement in research declined, he has become a prolific contributor to what’s called the “public understanding of science”—writing a popular tract on the search for a “Final Theory” in physics, decrying the corrosive effects of religion on knowledge and morality, trying to protect spending on particle accelerators from small-minded politicians, defending science against supposed armies of “social constructivists” and “relativists.” Mr. Weinberg was one of the authors of a comprehensive theory of subatomic particles and forces known as “the Standard Model,” and “To Explain the World” works within what was once “the Standard Model” of the history of science.

There are eight chapters on ancient physics and astronomy (when the Greeks almost got it right); two on the Middle Ages (when “not much [was] accomplished” but when “the ground was prepared” for later developments); and five on the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries (when, for all practical purposes, the crucial bits of modern science were discovered). These are followed by almost a hundred pages of “Technical Notes” for readers needing to freshen up their school physics and astronomy. Apart from some personal anecdotes in passages about present-day science to which Mr. Weinberg himself has made such important contributions, little is said about post-17th-century developments, which he apparently considers a mopping-up operation. In fact, Mr. Weinberg’s book is a history of some aspects of physics and astronomy, not a history of many of the things that have been called sciences: there’s just a little about medicine (mainly about absurd beliefs of the past) and next to nothing about chemistry, biology, natural history, the earth or the human sciences.

To Explain the World

By Steven Weinberg Harper, 416 pages, $28.99

“To Explain the World” is as personal as it is traditional. It’s about how the scientific past appears to the author as a “modern working scientist.” Mr. Weinberg wants to describe “how science progressed from its past to its present,” and, while he knows that many historians—
Thomas Kuhn,
most prominently—took the view that linear and cumulative progress is a problematic notion and that history is properly about trying to understand the world of the past in its own terms, Mr. Weinberg swats that notion away like a slightly annoying bug: “I don’t buy it.” He wants to share his view of how the now-accepted laws governing the world were discovered; how science as the privileged method of discovery—itself “waiting for people to discover it”—was discovered; who deserves prizes for anticipating modern scientific knowledge; and who deserves a good boxing about the ears. The announced purpose of this book isn’t understanding the past in its own terms, but “judging the past by the standards of the present,” awarding, as historian
Charles Homer Haskins
once put it, “medals for modernity.”

Plato
was “silly”; Aristotle was “tedious” and “wrong about the laws of nature”; Galileo’s emphasis on geometry over algebra “was somewhat behind the times”; Bacon was “overrated” and, despite the enthusiastic embrace of Baconianism by generations of thinkers, “It is not clear to me that anyone’s scientific work was actually changed for the better by Bacon’s writing.”
Descartes
was overrated too: “it is remarkable how wrong Descartes was about so many aspects of nature,” and his assertion that animals are machines, lacking consciousness, is refuted “on the basis of observation of several lovable pet cats.” Newton escapes whipping: His achievements “provided the paradigm that all subsequent science” (botany? seismology?) “has followed, as it became modern.”

Victorian histories of science were typically structured around a great and inevitable war between science and religion: Science was thwarted when religion was dominant, and science progressed with the “disenchantment of the world.” Mr. Weinberg is a modern Victorian. The authority of organized religion is identified as a problem for science, but more fundamental is the religious presumption that the universe has purpose or meaning: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” as Mr. Weinberg famously said elsewhere. And here he writes that “It was essential for the discovery of science that religious ideas be divorced from the study of nature.”

There’s a story told about a distinguished cardiac surgeon who, about to retire, decided he’d like to take up the history of medicine. He sought out a historian friend and asked her if she had any tips for him. The historian said she’d be happy to help but first asked the surgeon a reciprocal favor: “As it happens, I’m about to retire too, and I’m thinking of taking up heart surgery. Do you have any tips for me?”

The story is probably apocryphal, but it displays a real asymmetry between two expert practices. The surgeon knows that his skills are specialized and that they’re difficult to acquire, but he doesn’t think that the historian’s skills are anything like that. He assumes that writing history is pretty straightforward and that being a 21st-century surgeon gives you a leg up in documenting and interpreting, for example, theories of fever in the 17th century. Yet not every kind of technical expertise stands in this relation with the telling of its history. Modern installation artists don’t think they can produce adequate scholarly studies of Dutch Golden Age paintings, and it’s hard to find offensive linemen parading their competence in the writing the history of rugby.

Mr. Weinberg reckons that the history of science is far too important to be left to the historians, and “To Explain the World” is the kind of thing that might tempt academic historians to lose their cool. They’d remind him that the great thinkers of 17th-century science commonly considered themselves to be reforming natural knowledge to be Christianity’s handmaid. Figures like Newton and Boyle discerned divine purpose throughout nature, and not, as Mr. Weinberg implies, just because they were taking an unfortunate detour from properly scientific behavior. What counts as “natural” and what as “super-natural” turns out to be historically variable. Historians might insist that “science” is not a self-evidently stable category: the practices called “natural philosophy,” “mathematics,” and “natural history,” for example, were thought to be very different types of knowledge, while the notion of “science” in the past simply designated some idea of systematic knowledge.

The historians might also thump the table, insisting that searching for anticipations and foreshadowings is both wrong and illogical—”ahistorical” as they’d say. They’d wonder that a history written by a working scientist should be so little concerned with the messy day-to-day practices of getting experiments to succeed, getting calculations right, and persuading others of their truth and accuracy. They’d express bemusement at Mr. Weinberg’s insistence that science advances by rejecting teleology, even as he depicts its history as a triumphal progress from dark past to bright present.

Table-thumping isn’t interesting—whoever does it. Mr. Weinberg identifies his account as a personal view, and there’s no reason why people shouldn’t want to know how an eminent modern scientist (and public intellectual) thinks about all sorts of things. What is interesting is that these different stories about the historical development of science persist, with no prospect that professional historians of science will ever own their subject as, say, art historians own the history of art. Science remains almost unique in that respect. It’s modernity’s reality-defining enterprise, a pattern of proper knowledge and of right thinking, in the same way that—though Mr. Weinberg will hate the allusion—Christian religion once defined what the world was like and what proper knowledge should be. The same circumstance that gives science its immense modern cultural prestige also ensures that there will be an audience for its idealization and celebration. “To Explain the World” is for that audience.